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Beyond Emaciation

Hemmed in by oceanic verisimilitude
quite a lot like blazing pumps
with pompadour upholstery, bloated
enough to play a hunch on
lumpy reprehension, sputtering
atop murky monstrosity of
chronic maldistribution of rectifiers,
like the match that hit point
at the expense of spooners, or
the pompadour that cartwheeled
past Tumultuous Expectation
(Evacuation), slogging through
packed pitfalls and penny-dreadful
circuits, melody of tilts
& tailspins, tunnels &
torches. Suds, these are my
suds -- any attribution to
corroded (corrugated) segment,
spooked the stake and succumb
to eviscerated haberdashery
on line at navigational stump --
bumpy calculus to somewhere
near argumentation's eponymous
mortuary. Then walking ahead
or backing off, gesticulating
with meretricious momentum,
salamander retrieval intercepts
gummy (gulled) garrulousity
who meant all the time to
throw the dice to the other
corridor. The ball rolls
down the lane or street or
curb or row or meeting
ground and the titular
turner stoops
to swoop it up
but

[I was delighted by the subject of lecture by J-F Lyotard which I
kept hearing as 'beyond emaciation', just my topic, so it was
with some great disappointment that, after a while, I realized
the philosopher's title was "Beyond Emancipation". C.B.]

Untitled

To think of the effect of losing
affect in art is to effect
a change in our conception
of sentiment, which is always
its own idea, the surge around
the heart inscribed upon the heart,
memory's task to trace the wound,
stencil it on the impalpable history
of sensation, cultural artifact
beyond comparison. I cannot
think of him without feeling
an old aura, as of pleasure's
difficulty, inextricable weave
as hope confronts its end
and refuses to give ground,
logic the final confine of sense.
Thought is braided through
by tact, touching without
seeming to change a body, whether
of the sea or self. She says
the sea cannot laugh, is eternal
in its serious contemplation
of shorelines, tidal provinces.
She would laugh at such pre-
dispositions to be severe,
though I thought I heard
water laugh, or did it lap,
on a black beach beside
the catherdral-work of rock,
responsive to the fluted
shape of air. Surely, wind laughs
always. World's affect presses
against my skin, impresses laughter
on my malleable body, as the sound
of carnivals disperses
in wind, creating pools of voices
just past possibility of connection.
Tissued by what seems remorse
but is not, rather an episode
of rethinking feeling, transposing
the muted strings to organwork
in the wild air beside abrupt cliffs:
This my task, to reorder what is
already ordered, to wrap my words
in your tender air and make
myself a fluted column
cerebral and yet attuned to what
makes the world's end seem possible
and not to be feared as holocaust.
The guns are still warm
that would destroy all I wish to hold--
sweet stone or you--enveloped
in the savage ardor of my words.

Monopoems

The principal difference between poetry and fiction, even at the
avant-garde extremes, is that the latter implies narrative and
thus movement from one place to another, even if the fiction is
only one world long, while poetry realizes concentration of image
and effect. These poems, unlike my stories, should be published
without full stops.

On a Yellow Post-It
--Dear Ken Sherwood, 7 May 1993
Why don't you consider doing some
thing special with the enclosed
monopoems, considering them as a
kind of Cagean score from which you
can make inspired computer realiza=
tions, giving yourself appropriate
credit, and sending me the results.
[R.K.]

The moment of critique (and poetry) it seems to me stems from a
moment of crisis; writing covers this crisis, perhaps destroys it. I
am trying to respond to a moment of crisis I have perceived in
my environment. That crisis is the invocation of a literary
technology of jargon as a surrogate for discovery, inquiry and
investigation.

The Technological State of Poetry

Technology never constitutes an end in itself, although its
message may indeed be the media by which it expresses our
lives. So we have become vapid, mere ciphers, indicating that
there is in fact someone home, but after endless knocking no one
answers. The cough and the sputter by which writing undertakes
itself is similar to this occasional bumbling discussion of
technology, its metonymic tentacles fingering. As strategy, as
technique, languages are developed which account for this
sputtering, these aphasic disturbances which preclude the
possibilities under possibility's name. Speech from disordered
personalities is not the same as an ordered functionalist
appropriating negative qualities - a kind of law of increasing
returns exuding from negative space. This ex nihil poetic wealth,
its rhetoric, is based upon the productive appropriation of
negative or anti-productive terms.

triste tourist
What happens when a writer says I am in exile who is not in
exile? It freezes and destroys living possibility. Writing may be like
exile, but exile it is not. To appropriate such terms is the last
vestige of the colonial, the disenfranchisement and dispossession
of that with which it sought affinity. A politically dangerous
perspective; even more, the invocation of jargon creates an empty
vessel the writer hopes will speak for him/her. It is a facile
mockery of responsiveness: necessitated by a wealth which it
constantly alludes to by its indifference.

A metaphysical stranger is not the same as a real person living in
exile. For many people who arent writers, the fact of
dispossession is a way of life. That the writers identify themselves
with people in exile does not make this claim credible. The
rhetoric of exile is the living link between the historical situation
of a dispossessed and the metaphoricity of the claim of the
poet/critic searching for some position from which to write. Are
we so adrift that even the claims of identification with exile move
like continental plates under wandering sands, breaking up
catching the sky aflame. And yet to stop this movement, to assert
that the sands of the desert are no longer shifting is to fill this
hopelessness with the even more incredible hardening of
concretes. To do this would be an absolute cynicism; a false
consciousness precipitated by what the claims of exile are based
on: that is, the belief in a homeland. To say exile as metaphysical
and not to live it (i.e. to make a metaphor of it) is to feign pain
behavior.

Pain has no memory: pain has no thought. Yet memory is the life
of pain made clear by/in/with the body. Here, the matter of
prepositions is likewise ambivalent. Pain crosses the
frictive/fictive corrosive frontiers: it has no memory because by
its insistence, it obliterates all time, is a myth so painful that the
unqualified life of consciousness or subjectivity becomes so
overtly destructive that it annihilates anything that would exist
otherwise. Translation, which productively buries its source, is
the scar and demonstrates the painful nature of writing. Pressed
so close providing a polite resonance of that which it covers, the
scar could be anything; is in fact everything. The invocation of
wounds as abstract and ornamental demonstrates the activity
against which they poise their resistance.

Yes, these claims are compelling, but to allow them to go
unchecked, would simply affirm. To deny them by critique would
be to defang their claim to authenticity and rule by displacement.
A dictator in exile has no right or claim to authority any more
than a dictator in place. What is a person if not near-frozen to
death in isolation? Admitting ones exile is to admit defeat in the
face of impossibility. It does not reduce the pain but instead
thickens the scar which covers, demonstrates and destroys its
origin.

livre ivre
So as there is sol in solus, there is drunk in book. The necessity
of pushing past the limits of the written. The owl of Minerva molts
at dusk, then complains. The signs are dripping off of things, the
skin peeling back the method of pastiche, its eventual palimpsest.
One is not constituent of an argument, of arrangement. We are
surrounded by quotations and so are drowned out by the sound.
Words are small ambassadors we seek to be among. They would go
on without us; representative but not representative; sovereign
charges.

The public sphere as a private mental category.
How does one
know when a poem is done? Down in the heat of it, down in the
metabolic whispers, such borders are like living cells. The little
acids however environmentally determined are based on sets and
patterns of influence, the cells interchange -- this is all very
routine. The membranes sheer response to its external influence
is the broad chemical daylight edges into windows caked with
euphoria sweat and answers more akin to agoraphobia than
possible discourse. The form of the body is pressed hard against
the form of the poem. The pain is in harmony against the page
the art work and the body.

I am interested in questions, but I have served them to
destruction. The gravel of the heart grinds itself to friction
and discomfort. It, like the negative dialectic, incorporates
its own demise within the technology of its function. It
participates but is ridiculed for being anti-productive. Its
uselessness incorporates antithesis. I realized I had to begin
with my life, my questioning. My method
is my own life, those with whom I am in contact are what it consists of.

Sermon on Language

This - I mean whatever comes to mind when you read this -
is an organization - from the proto-Greek organ-grindo, "the
music swells, the monkey dances"- dedicated to enshrining
reality deep in the heart of itself. Its code name is Language,
and it was invented a war or two ago - actually during the
Second Gobi War, the one that ended the paleolothic - to con-
fer on sunlight such blessings as "It is sunning," or "The sun is
raining," or "Shine happens," according to the by-laws of your
local lodge. For individual languages - like Basque or Xhosa
or Cantonese or French - are in fact created and sustained as
lodges of the ancient freemasonic society of Speakers, the ones
with Language on their side, the so-called humans. All other
societies -and every form of society- is subsidiary to this, this
elegant and persuasive artifact which self-embeds its rules and
by-laws at once in every member who pays the dues of breath -
what we call speaking. You do not have to think very long or
hard to learn that all mysteries are ensconced in language and
extractable from language, and that obedience to the intricacies
of language in turn reveals the exact astro-dynamic efflorescent
energy of place and circumstance we nickname Truth. The con-
juncture. The lock. The habit the heart wears in the market, the
song it hums in the bathroom, the text encoded in its midnight
snores. Language is astrology indoors, it is the moon in the bed-
room and the sun in your pocket, its rules are your rules and
there is hardly a rumor - though there is a rumor - of anyone
disobedient to its prescriptions. Timid Nietzsche and meek
Blake followed its laws like lambs, and Lenin lay down with De
Maistre to graze on public language. Only the one - there
was one - who woke up to the sleep of named things ever broke
the lodge law and got away with it. All the way away. Faint-
ing, we follow.

Robert Kelly
20 April 1993

Page: 1
from the proto-Greek organ-grindo "the music swells, the monkey dances."

**~Eau de Vie~ (Paris Revery)**

~Apres moi le deluge...~

~Il pleut sur la ville...~

But in my heart
it no longer cries.
It only stands there
drenched in the downpour,
hair dripping,
beard streaming,
a madman,
crying out!
Brother, Sister
feed me!
Crying out:
Mother, Father
embrace me!
The streets are inundated,
the monuments of national glory are sinking away...
But the madman
only stands there,
refusing even to learn
how to swim,
crying out,
Sky,
quench my thirst!

**Pleasures of Philosophers**

~Evviva il cotello!~
Long live the little knife!
cried the audiences
of the 18th Century
at the pures ong
of the castrati
Ah, pathetic beauty,
plenitude of violence
~Fre're Jean-Jacques~
~Fre're Jean-Jacques~
~Sentez-vous..?~
~Sentez-vous..?~
~Quoi?~
City, World, Conflagration
"And you, M. Voltaire,
noble lover of truth,
have you found any yet?"
ding, dong, ~dang~

**Cultural Affairs**

A woman waiting in line
in Berkeley, California
said,
"I'm not a woman,
I'm a Gyno-American.
"And I'm expanding
my vaginal aura,"
she said
"That
would certainly get
my vote,"
said me.
"Thank God
I'm an atheist,"
said Buñuel.

Everyone seems to be going a little mad
nowadays.
One world, one peace.

The man in the moon the man
in the moon and the man in the tree
in the tree. in the tree in the moon

The Noble Savage is dead.
Long live the Noble Sausage.

Long live Television.

"And we're all gonna be typhoons"
boom

Repeat Chorus

~O Glivvia farriva~
~Me darlin' baleful dread,~
~Donut murther we~

**We** (II-1)

The-
village-in-the-stone-
in-the-mountain
Roses and the light,
rows of lavender
On a sun-drenched field,
the Empire of Humanity
founders upon a dewdrop
Love, like any perennial,
sometimes fails, loses color, falls
to the ground,
which is reptilian
and unblinking
because it has no lid
and cannot shut its eye,
seeing everything,
remembering nothing
We sleep under stars, clouds,
the surging weather
and when our bodies
rise to the surface,
halos encircling mute faces,
the gentle waves
wash away our tears

Ohio Zen

Remarks prepared for the "Storming the Reality Studio"
panel (moderated by Larry McCaffery, "refereed" by
Robert Coover, and featuring Kathy Acker, Ginevra
Bompiani, Marc Chenetier, Samuel R. Delany and Michael
Joyce) as part of Unspeakable Practices II, Festival of
Vanguard Narrative, Brown University February 24-27,1993.

Years ago I sometimes walked through honeysuckle hills of southern
Ohio with my father-in-law, a man who knew all the names of trees
and the Indian cure for asthma. Because it was the seventies I, of
course, did as my electrodes told me and romanticized his sense of
nature. One time just as we emerged from a steamy trail of maples
and low sassafras into the light, he said, "Lookie there, how
beautiful that is!" I tried to see what he saw against the far
hills, but saw only the contrail scars of a distant jet across the
sky.

"What's that, Pete?" I asked.

"Them contrails," he said, "are beautiful."

I don't know much about algebra, don't know what a slide-rule is
fo', don't know much about reality studio, but I do know, or think
I know, that to be a vanguard in an age that bottles vanguard like
papaya salsa will likely involve Ohio-mindedness, a constant state
of oscillation and contrariness (what hyperfiction writer Carolyn
Guyer calls the buzz-daze) whose zen becomes the truism etched by
chase lights into terrazzo by that Ohio zen sensei Jenny Holzer:
"At times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning."

Those who do not understand histamines are condemned to repeat
sit-coms. We will need an Ohio-zen in the fantasy islands of
Fujisney, where before long everyone will be able to sniff the lie
of virtuality and author grave stones with chase lights. The
problem with virtual reality (which is to say our imagination of
the future) is that it attempts to reproduce the supposed
seamlessness of the aural,visual, and psychological world. No
contrails. VR as it stands means to be meaningful when it should
be event-full, or empty (and so fall down and surrender).

Thus I'd like to propose what I'd call an aesthetic of %a-
polemikos%, of giving way(s) to time, of sit calm rather than
sitcom. A swooning zen in which the first thing a vanguard ought
to do is give up, stay where we are, even go backwards. Look for
someone to surrender to; insist that someone's in charge. Which is
to say, look for an edge, the temporary autonomous zone, the
interstitial. Such a zen involves a six-fold way.

1) Forget toys. Those of us who grew up when there used to be New
Cars know that technology is three card monte and sells the future
as a hedge against unhappiness about the cards on the table. The
Ohio-minded shift through the whole range of Hydromatique before
moving to StratoCruiser. Which is to say, make art in the
technology possessed by the most of whom you think your current
audience is; it will make them both happy and perplexed about the
need for a trademarked future.

2) Be like Eve: point out how they always change the names, eat
the centerpiece, get dizzy at the big dance and fall down. In our
garden of endless representation, aflow in the heavy water of the
aleatory convergence, we think we are aware of the merging of
somethings into Something Hypermedia, multiple fiction, virtual
reality, autopoesis, semantic space, simstim, cyberpunk, cyborg,
grundge, rave, wax, or the discovery of television among the bees,
sweet honey in the rock and roll: Dave moves into the Ed Sullivan
studio. "Give it up," as Arsenio says.

3) Wonka not Disney. "So much time, so little to do," instead of
"small world afterall." Let our desire be a criticism that lapses
before the form and so won't let form return to transparency; a
criticism in which-- rather than standing still--"With each step,"
as Laurie Anderson says, "you fall forward slightly./And then
catch yourself from falling.."

4) Stop fucking yourself. Whether you live in a MUD or a VR (a
multi-user dimension/dungeon or a virtual reality), don't measure
interaction as first personhood. Interaction manifests itself
through recognition, sympathy, and witness as much as through
impersonation, perception, and exploration.

5) Mind your manners. When authorship is proferred, refuse it;
when authorship is generalized, claim it. If they say you're an
author, refuse to be; if they say everyone's an author, tell them
your name is Willa or Edna. Constant declination continually
renders control meaningless. We need to be content and in so being
become the content of our own passionate technology.

6) Sometimes a vanguard ought to look like an old guard. Tell
stories about fathers-in-law and when there used to be
automobiles, have great expectations, let the dead come back to
life on the overleaf. It is as Helene Cixous says, "the mode of
passivity is our way-- really an active way-- of getting to know
things by letting ourselves be known by them. You don't seek to
master... [b]ut rather to transmit: to make things loved by making
them known."

Myself

I do not mean to tell you how to read this as much as how you
might think of writing it. These spaces offer some idea of what
has lead to the time I write this, what I think as I do so, and
what might follow from it. All of these spaces (at least those
contained within this section called "myself") are meant to be in
the most authentic voice I can here summon, knowing aside from
the theoretical questions that my own authenticity is always in
question even for me. Aware always also that as soon as you have
read this I begin to disappear or, like Mallarme's swan, freeze
into the form of my own inaction.

( 9.20.92 summer's end)

*Ten years later

My search is for what authentically can be said about a life, how
people talk about what is in their hearts and whether it is
possible to do so at all outside the ironical. 6..13.91

*September

Forms begin to show themselves. I just took a call from Julia P
at the VC public relations office asking for a brief definition of
hypertext. I gave her the one from ^the encyclopedia article,
"Hypertext readers not only choose the order of what they read but
in doing so also alter its form by their choices."

Then, moments later, writing in the space called
"Transformations," I name Bess Julia. I am beginning to see again
how these stories crisscross themselves, and again find myself
falling back on this stratagem of not so much confusing as
_fusing_ identities in the way Jane Yellowlees Douglas suggests^,
moving one fictional space over another as in my (old favorite)
image of the stereopticon. Thus, since these spaces are meant to
take a first step toward opening contours up to whoever you are
(and hello to you, love; call me up and I'll put your name here;
actually the whole point is that you can do so yourself, no?),
this note marks such a shift, such a weaving.

Otherwise these have been brilliant days here as I wrote in the
journal for Jera, who is the model for Obie, this his "book" (what
Wittgenstein calls an album).

"Not a blank to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered
and violated, but a space which can enjoy its own potentialities
and hopes and its own presence to oneself... compassionate time,
rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it..."
Merton, _Asian Journals_

*couplet

morning spent in ladder zen
all the while thinking
this is not working
my life is wrong
I am not empty
now it nears empty noon
om mani padme hum

^the encyclopedia

Encyclopedia on English Studies and Language Arts,
NCTE and Scholastic Press, forthcoming

*_autumnal walkings_

Two days ago two ducks swam the thin rapids beneath the foot
bridge along Fontyn Kill (just past the Shakespeare garden), the
bridge I think of as the place where I made my pact with Eamon
against my anger when we stopped here this past summer.

At my footfall on the bridge they splashed ahead into the small
pool, gliding and widening it in doing so: mallards.

Later the storm lays down a large tree along the drive in front of
Rombout, the crack and wheezing sigh followed by the easing thud
in the persistent rain and constant wind.

Yesterday morning by the gravel path around the shore of Sunset
Lake (which darkens and seems deeper now than its jade-scummed
late August shallows) three crows sat in profile just beyond the
bridge of the pact. Returning last night three drummers beat
talking rhythms on the opposite shore where they sat on a bench
beside a lone fisherman. Whether their drumming was prompted by
the new age lunacy of Iron John fervor or whether it was actual,
africana or indian, the sounded rich and melancholy in the pinkish
twilight of the still lake as I made my way past the red barn
where we sheltered from the rain, across the stone wall, and home.

*In my journal I wrote

"The Heron gone for days now. 'It's just the ice
I don't like,'
said the woman cashier at the Retreat."

*After eating good curry

a moment of euphoria, followed by the
feeling of loss, missing you boys this day of bridges and men
drumming. (And because I cannot stand it, I call.)

This morning wake late to cold, clear sunlight the day after steam
begins to fill radiators in this old house making it hard to
breathe or sleep.

On the way back from my walk, the heron not gone but doubled, a
mirror bird in the mirror pond beyond (I draw in my journal).

As the girl who keeps the ecological station drives off in her
brown Toyota wagon, bundled in a dark sweatsuit.

The African woman who lives at the ramshackle student house across
the lane from Rombout keeps a blanket spread out in the sun on her
lawn, day and night; a blue on blue print of stars and beasts
(whales or antelopes I cannot tell from the lane as I walk past).
It may be a beach blanket, I don't know, but she sits there days,
her village as much as this my desk, my screen, mine.

^not so much confusing as fusing

"As I begin at the place, it, I am not certain of the identities
of the "he' and "she" who lie talking in bed...

"...you can trek across a single place four times, as I did, and
discover that it possesses four radically different meanings each
time. It wasn't until I encountered a place more than twice that I
realized that the words themselves had actually stayed the same

"each... breathes life into a narrative of possibility which
momentarily obliterates the other possible, but yet to be
actualized, versions of reality. During my third and fourth
encounters with the same place, the imediate context remains the
same as in the second, what changes is my understanding of the
larger picture of adultery, deceit, and (as another possible
reading suggests) the guilty panic of a man... "
--Jane Yellowlees Douglas,"Understanding the Act of Reading:
The _WOE_ Beginner's Guide to Dissection." _Writing on the
Edge _2.2 (Spring 1991): 112-126.

*Wolf Island

white sheets over us in november light
this morning next to you
a memory of the Wolf Island ferry
sweet as death
the lost eventless lines of summer
picket fence, sunlight, waiting
in a line of waiting
a memory sweet as death
and as substanceless
just the summer and the light
the waiting, everything which is
gone and lost, our sons'
infancies, our dead parents' cigarette smoke
forming the november sunlight
the cars before us and behind
distant Kingston, beautiful women
beautiful men, tender
and swollen flesh, smells
of fish (the Quebecoise angler's
wrapped into a furtive plastic "wallet")
memory in a line of memory
bass from the weed bottom
at pleasant lake, the instant as
green from green swirls up
and smashes the still surface
boys knifing into the slip
as the ferry nears
everything which is
gone and lost, the puffed
swell of labia, ticked
nipple, light wrapped
substanceless sweet light
the meaningless wait
between isle and mainland
along a row of white cottages
gardens of pansies, post office,
chips shops & British woolens
the blast of conditioned air
inside the cushioned buick
diesel ferry, cadet sailors
lovers and strangers at the rail
the slow looping slant of
silver spittle to the distant
surface of the river's roil below
words, sunlight, sweet death
nearing the lost city

Spilling from my hand there are so
many of them they curl as I try to
hold on.

Card trick for those for whom
luxuriant dining has lost its thrill.

German deuce, the model, hungers
wide-mouthed. Der Spiegel on the
Moroccan throne.

Invent a deck to evade the clamor.
First, vanadium streaks between
burned trunks. The second
completely black.

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Anbian's third book, Antinostalgia, came out last year from RuddyDuck Press.

The latest of Charles Bernstein's many books is Dark City,
forthcoming this Spring from Sun and Moon.

Gary Gach has published his poems and translations in over 80 magazines
and 8 anthologies, including American Poetry Review, City Lights Review, Technicians of the Sacred, Exiled in the Word, and Zyzzva.

Lydia Gil, originally of Puerto Rico, now teaches in Birmingham.

Loss Pequeño Glazier's most recent book is Small Press: An Annotated Guidefrom Greenwood.

Ernesto Grosman has published English translations in The American Poetry
Review, and has translated Charles Olson and Charles Bernstein into Spanish.

Habitually in transit somewhere between Indonesia, New Mexico, and Hawaii,
Matthew Huddleston is also at work on his travel journals.

Acclaimed by Robert Coover in The New York Times Book Review,
Michael Joyce is author of the hypertext novel afternoon.

Robert Kelly is presently working on Queen of Terrors, a book of short fictions. His Selected Poems 1960-1992, recently gathered, is forthcoming.

Richard Kostelanetz has published visual, aural, video, and holographic
writing. The New Poetries and Some Old is his second collection of essays on poetry. Solos, Duets, Trios, & Choruses is his
most recent collection of poems.